Fleur Johns
Biographic Data
| ID | 93017 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fleur Johns |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fleur |
| FAMILY NAME | Johns |
| SIGNATURE | JOHNS F |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8351-7608 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 147 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Critical Judgments in Hostile Times
Nicole I’m a Munanjali and Birri Gubba woman, from Queensland, but I’ve been in Sydney for a long time. I had the great privilege of editing the Indigenous Legal Judgments book (Watson and Douglas 2021 ), a collection of sixteen judgments that have been reimagined from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives. One of the goals of the project was to bring together a community of scholars who are interested in Indigenous legal issues. We’…
Book Symposium on The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms
Do I feel proud?I reflected on this question recently while I gathered with several sweaty, strange, and gorgeous bodies on the streets of Washington DC for World Pride in June 2025.As I stood in the midday heat waiting impatiently amongst a crowd of thousands hoping to parade, the pink, blue, purple, yellow glitter began to trickle slowly down my face.I was an emotional mess and my sparkle reflected that.The beady glints of pink, blue, purple, a…
Digital Humanitarianism
In this interview, Fleur Johns elucidates the central themes of her recent book #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order. Situating her research alongside well-established critical analyses of digital platforms and algorithms, Johns elaborates on the distinctive characteristics of digital humanitarianism, how these can be studied through digital interfaces, and the politics of Big Tech’s involvement in this transform…
Palliative Presentism and Its Alternatives
International organizations (IOs) are having growing recourse to digital technologies in emergency response. Digital interfaces, such as online earning warning tools, are informing how humanitarian emergencies are analysed under international legal auspices and in what time frame. This article probes the latter shift: change in the temporality of emergencies being readied for international legal analysis. It situates this shift amid recent humani…
On consular internationalism
This article focuses international legal scholars’ attention on consular relations, consular work, and related international law. It does so for two main reasons. First, as scholars of diplomatic history and international relations have observed, consular work is of growing significance in global affairs. Second, there are largely unrealized possibilities for thinking about international law, and grappling afresh with its dilemmas, through a cons…
Introduction to the Symposium on International Laws Public and Private
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Rehoming diplomacy
Inspired by Karen Knop’s distinctive approach to international legal scholarship, and by her writings on gender and diplomacy, this article explores the centrality of households and household hierarchies in the international law of diplomacy as well as their significance for understanding hierarchy and privilege in international law more broadly. This argument is developed by attention, especially, to the negotiation history and text of the 1961 …
Help
Like many other areas of life, humanitarian practice and thinking are being transformed by information and communications technology. Yet the growing digitization of humanitarianism has so far been a little-noticed dimension of global order. It is one on which this book sheds new light. Based on more than seven years of interviews and interdisciplinary research on humanitarian and development professionals’ work within the UN system and elsewhere…
Introduction to the Symposium on Critical International Law and Technology
Scholarship concerned with international law, technology, and computation has been burgeoning since the mid-to-late twentieth century. Over the past decade, it has taken shape as a discernible sub-field of international legal scholarship. An International Law and Technology Interest Group was created within the American Society of International Law in 2013, for instance. By 2021, international law and technology was already considered ripe for “r…
Digital Humanitarian Mapping and the Limits of Imagination in International Law
Humanitarian maps assembled using digital technology are indicative of transformations underway in how the world is made knowable, sensible, and actionable, including for international legal purposes. These transformations are exemplified by the Missing Maps Project (MMP), an initiative of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a U.S.-registered non-profit, and three other non-governmental organisations operating internationally: American Red Cross…
Encuentros con seres notables
The artist María Elvira Escallón presents "Encounters with Remarkable Beings," a work made with branches of sabanero jasmine and eucalyptus, inspired by the book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" by George Gurdieff. The piece suggests the coexistence and interactions between different orders of life: God, human beings, nature, life, and death. Escallón seeks to foster encounters that make us feel a kinship with plant beings, highlighting the importa…
State Changes
My 2019 article ‘From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State’ (P2P) drew attention to some shortcomings of the kinds of critical, reformist impulses fostered in law and development work. I sought to show that persistent preoccupations with the destructive hubris of ‘top-down’ planning—especially state planning—bypassed the tendency for great power to be deployed in other stylistic modes: through the release and responsive tweakin…
Data jurisdictions and rival regimes of algorithmic regulation
This article aims to characterize and compare some approaches to regulation manifest in distinct yet intersecting domains of data assemblage and algorithmic development and to explore some implications of their operating in concert. We focus on three such types of domain, each oriented toward different purposes: market jurisdictions, public science jurisdictions, and jurisdictions of humanitarianism. These domains we characterize as data jurisdic…
Centers and Peripheries in a World of Blockchain
If, as has been claimed by one of their most successful proponents, blockchain technologies “automate away . . . center[s]” of authority, in lieu of subordinating peripheries, then what might this imply for global governance: already the work of a distributed politico-legal regime without a single center? Does blockchain seem likely to emancipate and equalize in the ways frequently anticipated? Whose authority is being “automate[d] away” and whos…
Governance by Data
Law and social science scholars have long elucidated ways of governing built around state governance of populations and subjects. Yet many are now grappling with the growing prevalence of practices of governance that depart, to varying degrees, from received models. The profusion of digital data, and the deployment of machine learning in its analysis, are redirecting states’ and international organizations’ attention away from the governance of p…
Ejil Roll of Honour; 2021 Ejil Peer Reviewer Prize; Changes in the Masthead; Germany v Italy
"Surveillance capitalism" and the angst of the petit sovereign
This is a review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Harvard University Press, 2019). It argues that the book serves its readers well as a critical guide to the social and economic imperatives put forward by the platform economy, but that as a work of political economy or social theory for the "new frontier of power", it does not
Loops, ladders and links
War Without Words
This guest editorial introduces an AJIL Unbound symposium discussing Dan Efrony & Yuval Shany's article in the American Journal of International Law: A Rule Book on the Shelf? Tallinn Manual 2.0 on Cyberoperations and Subsequent State Practice
From Planning to Prototypes
All states have pursued what James C. Scott characterised as modernist projects of legibility and simplification: maps, censuses, national economic plans and related legislative programs. Many, including Scott, have pointed out blindspots embedded in these tools. As such criticism persists, however, the synoptic style of law and development has changed. Governments, NGOs and international agencies now aspire to draw upon immense repositories of d…
Data associations in global law and policy
Social phenomena—or the condition of society—may be “seized indirectly when there is a slight change in one older association mutating into a slightly newer or different one” (Latour, 2005: 36). The aim of this special issue is to trace mutations underway in those associations rendered or experienced in data and to probe some patterns that these changing ties draw. In particular, contributors to this issue reflect upon associations traceable in d…
"Governing Infrastructure in the Age of the "Art of the Deal
Many different types of organization provide public services or goods and build public works without being, strictly speaking, part of government. Such entities tend to be seen as more innovative than government proper, both because of their organizational autonomy and because they primarily use private-law techniques (contracts, mainly) and lay claim to private sector credentials. This article examines the presumed correlation between moves towa…
Data Mining as Global Governance
Data mining technologies are increasingly prominent in development and aid initiatives in which context they may be understood to be doing work of global governance. This chapter explains how data mining may be so characterized and explores how this work may be compared to more conventional governance techniques and institutions. The chapter first provides an overview of some exemplary initiatives among international institutions in which data mi…
Data, Detection, and the Redistribution of the Sensible in International Law
One dusty day in 2002, at Takhta Baig Voluntary Repatriation Centre near Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, an Afghan woman—let us call her Amena—entered a nondescript room and sat down in front of a camera. A brief conversation took place with a woman sitting nearby at a computer terminal. Amena placed her chin where she was directed to do so, swept back a few strands of hair creeping out of her veil, and stared straight ahead for a few seconds …
Theorizing the Corporation in International Law
This chapter redescribes the rather oblique theorizations of the corporation in public international law, by first outlining some generic characterizations of the corporation in international legal writing, before turning to two areas of international legal doctrine, practice, and scholarly work: international investment law and international human rights. In both of these areas, the corporation has often been identified with potential dysfunctio…
Loops, ladders and links
Guantánamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception
This article takes issue with prevailing characterizations of Guantanamo Bay as an instance of international law and US law's breakdown or withdrawal: a surmounting of the rule by the exception. Contentions along these lines circulating in international legal literature and, in a divergent sense, in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, are examined in a critical light. Against these accounts, this article argues that Guantanamo Bay is…
Events
Foreword, Martti Koskenniemi 1. Introduction, Fleur Johns, Richard Joyce & Sundhya Pahuja 2. The International Law in Force: Anachronistic Ethics and Divine Violence, Jennifer Beard 3. Absolute Contingency and the Prescriptive Force of International Law, Chiapas-Valladolid, ca. 1550, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera 4. Latin Roots: The Force of International Law as Event, Peter Fitzpatrick 5. Westphalia: Event, Memory, Myth, Richard Joyce 6. The Force of a…
Data jurisdictions and rival regimes of algorithmic regulation
This article aims to characterize and compare some approaches to regulation manifest in distinct yet intersecting domains of data assemblage and algorithmic development and to explore some implications of their operating in concert. We focus on three such types of domain, each oriented toward different purposes: market jurisdictions, public science jurisdictions, and jurisdictions of humanitarianism. These domains we characterize as data jurisdic…
Governance by Data
Law and social science scholars have long elucidated ways of governing built around state governance of populations and subjects. Yet many are now grappling with the growing prevalence of practices of governance that depart, to varying degrees, from received models. The profusion of digital data, and the deployment of machine learning in its analysis, are redirecting states’ and international organizations’ attention away from the governance of p…
"Governing Infrastructure in the Age of the "Art of the Deal
Many different types of organization provide public services or goods and build public works without being, strictly speaking, part of government. Such entities tend to be seen as more innovative than government proper, both because of their organizational autonomy and because they primarily use private-law techniques (contracts, mainly) and lay claim to private sector credentials. This article examines the presumed correlation between moves towa…
Global governance through the pairing of list and algorithm
The work of global governance increasingly entails some pairing of list and algorithm. Across sectors as diverse as environmental conservation, migration, nuclear nonproliferation, humanitarian aid, counterterrorism, and more, the list-plus-algorithm is, it seems, displacing rival juridical forms on the global scale. This paper probes some implications of the proliferation of this conjunctive form of'law'. Beginning with a typology of some types …
From Planning to Prototypes
All states have pursued what James C. Scott characterised as modernist projects of legibility and simplification: maps, censuses, national economic plans and related legislative programs. Many, including Scott, have pointed out blindspots embedded in these tools. As such criticism persists, however, the synoptic style of law and development has changed. Governments, NGOs and international agencies now aspire to draw upon immense repositories of d…
Data, Detection, and the Redistribution of the Sensible in International Law
One dusty day in 2002, at Takhta Baig Voluntary Repatriation Centre near Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, an Afghan woman—let us call her Amena—entered a nondescript room and sat down in front of a camera. A brief conversation took place with a woman sitting nearby at a computer terminal. Amena placed her chin where she was directed to do so, swept back a few strands of hair creeping out of her veil, and stared straight ahead for a few seconds …
The Risks of International Law
The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation in the writings on risk and uncertainty. Led by the work of writers such as Beck, Luhmann, Ewald, and Giddens, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have been engaged in reflections on the ways in which our understanding of risk structure informs decision-making and the attribution of responsibility. One of the central topics in this body of literature is the transformation of the c…
Data associations in global law and policy
Social phenomena—or the condition of society—may be “seized indirectly when there is a slight change in one older association mutating into a slightly newer or different one” (Latour, 2005: 36). The aim of this special issue is to trace mutations underway in those associations rendered or experienced in data and to probe some patterns that these changing ties draw. In particular, contributors to this issue reflect upon associations traceable in d…
The League of Nations and the Construction of the Periphery Introduction
Since 2006, the Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL) has been dedicating a series of special issues of its Articles section to the theme ‘International Law and the Periphery’. This issue marks the fourth in this series
Guantánamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception
This article takes issue with prevailing characterizations of Guantanamo Bay as an instance of international law and US law's breakdown or withdrawal: a surmounting of the rule by the exception. Contentions along these lines circulating in international legal literature and, in a divergent sense, in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, are examined in a critical light. Against these accounts, this article argues that Guantanamo Bay is…
Performing Power
This article presents a stylized account of legal work involved in doing a corporate deal transnationally, drawing inspiration from the work of American legal realist, Robert Hale. In so doing, it seeks to show that legal institutions on which transnational corporate power depends are far more plastic, discordant, and irresolute than commonly recorded. By tethering global legal order to the decisive interiority of the transnational corporation, w…
The Risks of International Law
The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation in the writings on risk and uncertainty. Led by the work of writers such as Beck, Luhmann, Ewald, and Giddens, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have been engaged in reflections on the ways in which our understanding of risk structure informs decision-making and the attribution of responsibility. One of the central topics in this body of literature is the transformation of the c…
Events
Foreword, Martti Koskenniemi 1. Introduction, Fleur Johns, Richard Joyce & Sundhya Pahuja 2. The International Law in Force: Anachronistic Ethics and Divine Violence, Jennifer Beard 3. Absolute Contingency and the Prescriptive Force of International Law, Chiapas-Valladolid, ca. 1550, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera 4. Latin Roots: The Force of International Law as Event, Peter Fitzpatrick 5. Westphalia: Event, Memory, Myth, Richard Joyce 6. The Force of a…
The League of Nations and the Construction of the Periphery Introduction
Since 2006, the Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL) has been dedicating a series of special issues of its Articles section to the theme ‘International Law and the Periphery’. This issue marks the fourth in this series
Annelise Riles. Collateral Knowledge
Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets does for collateral, in legal thought and practice, something like what Marcel Duchamp's Fountain did with and for the urinal in artistic thought and practice. The book takes what Annelise Riles calls little sideline (at 1) of mundane use in global financial markets an item of undeniable practical importance, but typically considered unworthy of serious attention and encourages…
Adam McBeth, Justine Nolan and Simon Rice, The International Law of Human Rights
In a rather cantankerous 1971 article in the (UK) Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, William Twining proposed four ‘Laws of Textbooks’ by which the genre was supposedly constrained: ‘Thou Shalt Cover the Ground, the Whole Ground and Nothing but the Ground’; ‘Thou Shalt be Brief’; ‘Thou Shalt be Reliable’ and ‘Thou Shalt Keep up to Date’.1 The result, Twining argued, at least in the jurisprudence field, was a stereotypical text: ‘to…
The Mekong
An international river basin is an ecological system, an economic thoroughfare, a geographical area, a font of life and livelihoods, a geopolitical network and, often, a cultural icon. It is also a socio-legal phenomenon. This book is the first detailed study of an international river basin from a socio-legal perspective. The Mekong River Basin, which sustains approximately 70 million people across Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vie…
Starting and Stopping Points
Open the website of the Financial Action Task Force (or FATF) and find your way to the “FATF Presidency” page. Up until the end of June 2015, you would have encountered a headshot of a dapper fellow with smiling eyes and a pink bowtie: Roger Wilkins OA, President of FATF between July 2014 and June 2015. A one time “mandarin” of the public service in Australia (former Secretary of the federal Attorney-General’s Department in that country), Mr. Wil…
Theorizing the Corporation in International Law
This chapter redescribes the rather oblique theorizations of the corporation in public international law, by first outlining some generic characterizations of the corporation in international legal writing, before turning to two areas of international legal doctrine, practice, and scholarly work: international investment law and international human rights. In both of these areas, the corporation has often been identified with potential dysfunctio…
The Temporal Rivalries of Human Rights
Nation-states' "boundaries" are produced in time: around official working hours and terms of office, for instance, and in the historicomythic "life of the nation." Global human rights practices affirm and depend on nation-states' temporal authority, while also calling that authority into question. In different ways, global markets do likewise. In recent decades, the ubiquity of both finance capital and international human rights law, among other …
Beyond Bunker and Vaccine
Who was responsible for the cyberincursions upon the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that took place during the U.S. presidential campaign? Russia's “ senior most officials ”? A “ a tattooed 26-year-old ” running a server rental company in western Siberia? U.S. political party leaders and other insiders disinclined to implement “ best in class ” cybersecurity measures? Or does responsibility lie elsewhere
Introduction to Symposium on Cybersecurity and the Changing International Law of Data
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
He Mekong
The Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach River Basin Development. By Ben Boer, Philip Hirsch, Fleur Johns, Ben Saul and Natalia Scurrah. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016. Softcover: 251pp. This book is impressive assemblage of scholarship by four professors of and one researcher in human and environmental geography--all based at Australian universities. In eight chapters that bear no single author identification, the book presents the and hydropower dev…
Global governance through the pairing of list and algorithm
The work of global governance increasingly entails some pairing of list and algorithm. Across sectors as diverse as environmental conservation, migration, nuclear nonproliferation, humanitarian aid, counterterrorism, and more, the list-plus-algorithm is, it seems, displacing rival juridical forms on the global scale. This paper probes some implications of the proliferation of this conjunctive form of'law'. Beginning with a typology of some types …
Data Mining as Global Governance
Data mining technologies are increasingly prominent in development and aid initiatives in which context they may be understood to be doing work of global governance. This chapter explains how data mining may be so characterized and explores how this work may be compared to more conventional governance techniques and institutions. The chapter first provides an overview of some exemplary initiatives among international institutions in which data mi…
Data, Detection, and the Redistribution of the Sensible in International Law
One dusty day in 2002, at Takhta Baig Voluntary Repatriation Centre near Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, an Afghan woman—let us call her Amena—entered a nondescript room and sat down in front of a camera. A brief conversation took place with a woman sitting nearby at a computer terminal. Amena placed her chin where she was directed to do so, swept back a few strands of hair creeping out of her veil, and stared straight ahead for a few seconds …
Data associations in global law and policy
Social phenomena—or the condition of society—may be “seized indirectly when there is a slight change in one older association mutating into a slightly newer or different one” (Latour, 2005: 36). The aim of this special issue is to trace mutations underway in those associations rendered or experienced in data and to probe some patterns that these changing ties draw. In particular, contributors to this issue reflect upon associations traceable in d…
"Governing Infrastructure in the Age of the "Art of the Deal
Many different types of organization provide public services or goods and build public works without being, strictly speaking, part of government. Such entities tend to be seen as more innovative than government proper, both because of their organizational autonomy and because they primarily use private-law techniques (contracts, mainly) and lay claim to private sector credentials. This article examines the presumed correlation between moves towa…
War Without Words
This guest editorial introduces an AJIL Unbound symposium discussing Dan Efrony & Yuval Shany's article in the American Journal of International Law: A Rule Book on the Shelf? Tallinn Manual 2.0 on Cyberoperations and Subsequent State Practice
From Planning to Prototypes
All states have pursued what James C. Scott characterised as modernist projects of legibility and simplification: maps, censuses, national economic plans and related legislative programs. Many, including Scott, have pointed out blindspots embedded in these tools. As such criticism persists, however, the synoptic style of law and development has changed. Governments, NGOs and international agencies now aspire to draw upon immense repositories of d…
"Surveillance capitalism" and the angst of the petit sovereign
This is a review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Harvard University Press, 2019). It argues that the book serves its readers well as a critical guide to the social and economic imperatives put forward by the platform economy, but that as a work of political economy or social theory for the "new frontier of power", it does not
Loops, ladders and links
Centers and Peripheries in a World of Blockchain
If, as has been claimed by one of their most successful proponents, blockchain technologies “automate away . . . center[s]” of authority, in lieu of subordinating peripheries, then what might this imply for global governance: already the work of a distributed politico-legal regime without a single center? Does blockchain seem likely to emancipate and equalize in the ways frequently anticipated? Whose authority is being “automate[d] away” and whos…
Governance by Data
Law and social science scholars have long elucidated ways of governing built around state governance of populations and subjects. Yet many are now grappling with the growing prevalence of practices of governance that depart, to varying degrees, from received models. The profusion of digital data, and the deployment of machine learning in its analysis, are redirecting states’ and international organizations’ attention away from the governance of p…
Political science (29 works) · Law (24 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Law and economics (15 works) · Business (11 works) · International Law and Human Rights (10 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Politics (9 works)